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Questionable Content forum
The Questionable Content forum is a site hosted by Jeph Jacques. Historical Overview The QC Forums were set up by Jeph in September 2003, just a few weeks after he started the comic. Around March and April 2004, a community of like-minded people migrated to it from another forum. They were very interested in music, as is Jeph - which is why the BAND forum contains so much information - and they used the CHATTER forum as their main means of socialising together. In time, a rift developed between this group and those who came simply to discuss the comic - who were often made to feel unwelcome in the other parts of the forum. Because the moderators were all from the first group, the comic discussion came to be left largely unmoderated, and got into a state such that Jeph considered closing the forums altogether - as a first step he removed the link to the forums from the main menu above all the comic pages to obscurity at the bottom of a side menu which only appears on the home page. Around this time the older messages in the QC Discussion were deleted. At the end of 2010, following the bad behavior of the forums at the time of Marten and Dora's break up (the worst of which has been deleted), more effective moderation of the QC Discussion forum was put in place; independently of this, in early 2011 a new forum was set up elsewhere by members of the first group for them to use as their own - to which that community migrated through the summer and autumn of 2011, leaving the BAND and CHATTER forums much quieter and calmer than they were formerly. The older parts of the CHATTER forum have now also been deleted as being of no remaining interest to anyone. There is no longer any rift between different parts of the forum (though naturally not everyone takes part in different areas), and all are overseen equally by the moderators. Jeph is no longer threatening to close the forums, and is content with how they are now behaving; however, he takes little further interest in the discussions on them and is unlikely to increase their visibility. There are currently over 8,000 registered members, but only a small fraction of these are currently active; the total number of genuine members who have registered is unknown because the membership list has been pruned of inactive accounts in the past, and there have been many accounts created by spammers using spambots. At one time three new accounts were being created by spammers every hour, though most of these were then being detected automatically and disabled before they could be used - but recent upgrading of the forum registration system has made it possible to prevent all spambot registration attempts before accounts ever get created. There was an extended period through 2009 and 2010 when the new member registration system didn't work, because the activation emails were not getting sent; but that has now been fixed, so new members appear regularly. Organisation Admins and Moderators As of March 2012, the active Admin is pwhodges; Jeph himself is an admin, of course, and there are a couple of others who are no longer active in the forum. The active Global Moderators are Is it cold in here?, Redball, and Method of Madness; there are five other global moderators who are no longer active in the forum or only visit occasionally. There are no forum-specific moderators. Rules and behavior The rules that Jeph wrote for the forum when it was started have remained in place unchanged. Some additional guidance has been provided by other admins and moderators at various times when it has seemed necessary, and this has recently been consolidated and updated. *Jeph's original rules *pwhodges's explanation and expansion Additional guidance is given in sticky threads at the top of some forums - in particular the QC Discussion forum and the Discuss! forum. Things that tick Jeph off Based on what's in the forum rules and scattered through various posts, Jeph is troubled by nitpicking, lack of civility between forum participants, unrealistic and obsessive proposed romantic pairings of characters, people whose participation is limited to posting in every discussion how much they hate some character, and having his guests make demands about how the comic will go. Another of his grievances is having to explain some point that he'd expressed clearly in the comic itself. Notable Threads QC Discussion Subforum ;WCDT (Weekly Comic Discussion Thread) Each week there is a thread for discussion of that week's comics - this has WCDT in the title, and the dates and comic numbers. It is preferred that discussion of individual comics take place in that thread, while other threads can be started for discussions not related to specific comics. Usually, JWHouk, BenRG, or Gyrre starts these on Sunday mornings/nights (US time), and are accompanied by a tongue-in-cheek poll. ;QC Captions Also each week there is a thread where a user (usually at this point "I Dug Up Her Grave") posts a single panel from a recent strip, with the word balloons whited out, and asks forumites for an "alternate script" for the panel. Some of these prove to be more hilarious than the original panel. Jeph hasn't said anything to date against these threads, which are on the 67th "Volume" through mid-June of 2012. ;Ask Jeph The "Ask Jeph" thread - where Jeph used to answer questions. However, when he got tired of the forum's bad behaviour, Jeph stopped participating in the thread that he had started. For a short time he used Formspring to answer queries, but he found the signal-to-noise ratio there too low. He now accepts questions through his Tumblr, and makes regular posts of answers to selected questions there. Other Fun Things Subforum ;BAND *The *ahem* thread - what is this i don't even *Guitar Thread - group wanking session *Shows - more wanking ;CHATTER *Photo Thread - for stalking people *Pointless Thread - a random assortment of funny crap *Blog Thread - A BLOO BLOO BLOO Status Tags The forum shows a tag word or phrase alongside each forum user's name. This tag is associated with the number of posts the user has made. There is also a single user (no longer active) with a custom title: Pshooooo Category:About the strip